Tag Archives: Institute of Expertology

Even as the Institute of Expertology has embarked on a preliminary study of Senator Barack Obama’s positions on such subjects as Iraq War troop withdrawals, public campaign financing, and the merits of the NAFTA agreement, Andy Borowitz has been analyzing the reaction the presumptive Democratic Party nominee’s recent remarks on these topics has produced in a specific group of experts: liberal bloggers. In pursuit of our continuing nonpartisan goal of contributing to uninhibited academic discourse, we are proud to reproduce Mr Borowitz’s report here:

The liberal blogosphere was aflame today with new accusations that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill) is trying to win the 2008 presidential election.

Suspicions about Sen. Obama’s true motives have been building over the past few weeks, but not until today have the bloggers called him out for betraying the Democratic Party’s losing tradition.

“Barack Obama seems to be making a very calculated attempt to win over 270 electoral votes,” wrote liberal blogger Carol Foyler at LibDemWatch.com, a blog read by a half-dozen other liberal bloggers. “He must be stopped.”

But those comments were not nearly as strident as those of Tracy Klugian, whose blog LoseOn.org has backed unsuccessful Democratic candidates since 2000.

“Increasingly, Barack Obama’s message is becoming more accessible, appealing, and yes, potentially successful,” he wrote. “Any Democrat who voted for Dukakis, Mondale or Kerry should regard this as a betrayal.”

Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean said that he was “sympathetic” to the concerns of bloggers who worry that their nominee seems stubbornly bent on winning the election, but he warned them that the DNC’s “hands are tied.”

“If Sen. Obama is really determined to win, I don’t think any of us can talk him out of it,” Mr. Dean said.

Liberal bloggers said that they would be watching Sen. Obama’s vice-presidential selection process “very closely” for signs that he is plotting to win the election.

“Barack Obama still has a chance to pick someone disastrous as a sign that he wants to lose this thing,” Ms. Foyler wrote. “If not, he should brace himself for some really mean blog posts.”

If you enjoyed Andy’s essay, check out his earlier article about how Iraq’s Sunnis and Shiites are conspiring to confuse John McCain. You can find it by clicking here. Or, better still, visit Andy’s website, and subscribe to his brilliant Internet column, The Borowitz Report. It’s free!

McCain (Mis)Speaks

How the Senator Won the War of Words in Iraq (again and again and again…)

The Iraq war was a disaster for Iraq, a disaster for the United States, a disaster for the Middle East, a disaster for the world community, but most of all, it was a disaster for the experts.

They were wrong about its difficulty. (It was to be either “a cakewalk” or “a walk in the park” — take your pick). They were wrong about how our troops would be greeted (“as liberators” said Vice President Dick Cheney on September, 14, 2003; “with kites and boom boxes” wrote Professor Fouad Ajami on October 7, 2002). They were wrong about weapons of mass destruction. (“Iraq not only hasn’t accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool — or possibly a Frenchman — could conclude otherwise” wrote Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen on February 6, 2003.) They were wrong about how many troops would be needed. (“It’s hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct a war itself,” said Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz on Feb 27, 2003.)

They were wrong about the number of casualties. (“…we’re not going to have any casualties,” said President George W. Bush in March, 2003). They were wrong about how much it would cost. (“The costs of any intervention would be very small,” according to White House economic advisor Glenn Hubbard on October 4, 2002). They were wrong about how long it would last. (“It isn’t going to be over in 24 hours, but it isn’t going to be months either,” claimed Richard Perle on July 11, 2002.) They were wrong about the “sinister nexus between Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network,” as Secretary of State Colin Powell put it in addressing the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003. They were wrong about the likelihood of Iraq descending into civil war. (“[There is] a broad Iraqi consensus favoring the idea of pluralism,” insisted William Kristol and Robert Kagan on March 22, 2004.) There was, in fact, very little they were not wrong about.

Who are we to make such charges? Not to be boastful, we are, respectfully, the CEO and president — the founders, as it were — of the Institute of Expertology, which has been surveying expert opinion for almost 25 years. It is true that our initial study, The Experts Speak: The Definitive Guide to Authoritative Misinformation, came under attack back in 1990 because, at the time, we failed to find a single expert who was right, although we readily conceded that, in statistical theory, it was possible that the experts were right as much as half the time. It just proved exceedingly difficult to find evidence of that other 50%.

In Mission Accomplished!, our new study of the experts — people who, by virtue of their official status, formal title, academic degree, professional license, public office, journalistic beat, quantity of publications, experience, and/or use of highly technical jargon, are presumed to know what they are talking about — we once again came under attack from critics who claimed that our failure to include any misstatements by Senator Barack Obama betrayed a political bias. These allegations were quickly refuted. Everybody knows that Obama has no experience and therefore does not qualify as an expert. Senator Hillary Clinton, who voted to authorize the Iraq war, did make the cut, but the presidential candidate-cum-expert of genuine interest is Senator John McCain.

At first, we were impressed by the senator’s statements in Republican primary debates about how he had actually opposed the Bush administration’s conduct of the war from the start. As he told CNN’s Kiran Chetry, in August of 2007, “I was the greatest critic of the initial four years, three-and-a half years.”

Well, having dug into those missing years a bit, here, for the record, is what we found to be Senator McCain’s typical responses to some of the key questions posed above:

How would American troops be greeted?: “I believe… that the Iraqi people will greet us as liberators.” (March 20, 2003)

Did Saddam Hussein have a nuclear program that posed an imminent threat to the United States?: “Saddam Hussein is on a crash course to construct a nuclear weapon.” (October 10, 2002)

Will a war with Iraq be long or short?: “This conflict is… going to be relatively short.” (March 23, 2003)

How is the war going?: “I would argue that the next three to six months will be critical.” (September 10, 2003)

How is it going (almost two months later, from the war’s “greatest critic”)? “I think the initial phases of [the war] were so spectacularly successful that it took us all by surprise.” (October 31, 2003)

Is this war really necessary?: “Only the most deluded of us could doubt the necessity of this war.” (August 30, 2004)

How is it going? (Recurring question for the war’s “greatest critic”): “We will probably see significant progress in the next six months to a year.” (December 4, 2005)

Will the President’s “surge” of troops into Baghdad and surrounding areas that the senator had been calling for finally make the difference?: “We can know fairly well [whether the surge is working] in a few months.” (February 4, 2007)

In April 2007, accompanied by several members of Congress, Senator McCain made a surprise visit to Baghdad to assess the surge, had a “stroll” through a market in the Iraqi capital, and then held a news conference where he discussed what he found: “Things are better and there are encouraging signs. I’ve been here many times over the years. Never have I been able to drive from the airport. Never have I been able to go out into the city as I was today. The American people are not getting the full picture of what’s happening here today.”

The next evening, NBC’s Nightly News provided further details on that “stroll.” The Senator and Congressmen were accompanied by “100 American soldiers, with three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships overhead.” (In addition, the network said, still photographs provided by the military revealed that McCain and his colleagues had been wearing body armor during their entire stroll.)

Reality check: Five months later, on September 12, 2007, McCain again observed that “the next six months are going to be critical.”

Six months later, McCain claimed that the U.S. had finally reached a genuine turning point in Iraq and that his faith in the surge was (once again) vindicated. On March 17, 2008, he reported: “We are succeeding. And we can succeed and American casualties overall are way down. That is in direct contradiction to predictions made by the Democrats and particularly Senator Obama and Senator Clinton. I will be glad to stake my campaign on the fact that this has succeeded and the American people appreciate it.”

Well, we at the Institute of Expertology appreciate it, too, and we are, of course, pleased to record the Senator’s ever-renewable faith in this latest turning point. As scrupulous scholars, however, we do feel compelled to add that the Senator is not the first to detect such a turning point. Indeed on July 7, 2003, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith said: “This month will be a political turning point for Iraq.”

On November 6, 2003, President Bush observed: “We’ve reached another great turning point…” On June 16, 2004, President Bush claimed: “A turning point will come two weeks from today.”

That same day the Montreal Gazette headlined an editorial by neoconservative columnist Max Boot: “Despite the Negative Reaction by Much of the Media, U.S. Marines Did a Good Job in Fallujah, a Battle That Might Prove a Turning Point.” On February 2, 2005, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stated: “On January 30th in Iraq, the world witnessed an important moment in the global struggle against tyranny, a moment that historians might one day call a major turning point.” On March 7, 2005 William Kristol wrote: “[T]he Iraqi election of January 30, 2005… will turn out to have been a genuine turning point.”

On December 18, as that year ended, Vice President Cheney, while conceding that “the level of violence has continued,” assured ABC News: “I do believe that when we look back on this period of time, 2005 will have been the turning point…”

The Institute continued to record turning points in remarkable numbers in 2006, and 2007, but perhaps in 2008 the surge will, indeed, turn out to be the turning point to end all turning points. After all, Senator McCain has staked his campaign on it.

* Christopher Cerf and Victor S. Navasky are the co-authors of the recently published Mission Accomplished! Or How We Won the War in Iraq: The Experts Speak, which provided the basis for this essay. Their previous book, also a product of The Institute of Expertology, is The Experts Speak: The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation. They appeared recently on Bill Moyers Journal.

If you missed the live broadcast of Victor Navasky and Christopher Cerf’s one-hour WBAI radio special devoted to their bestselling book, Mission Accomplished (or How We Won the War in Iraq), that doesn’t mean you’ll never have a chance to enjoy the plethora of deeply depressing (but gruesomely funny) misstatements, failed predictions, and outright lies about Iraq presented on the show. All you need to do to get WBAI to stream the program directly to your computer is click here.

Institute of Expertology co-founders Victor S. Navasky and Christopher Cerf are scheduled to host a special one-hour program based on their new book, Mission Accomplished! (or How We Won the War in Iraq), tomorrow, July 6th, on New York City’s Pacifica radio station, WBAI. The program will be broadcast from 11 am to noon, and, if you’re in the New York area, you can tune in to it at 99.5 on your FM dial. If you’re not in the Big Apple, don’t fret — the program will also be streamed live over the Internet. To listen in on the Web, just click here.

The Institute of Expertology is proud to provide you with an opportunity to hear Robert F. Kennedy’s June 23rd interview of Institute co-founders Christopher Cerf and Victor S. Navasky. The interview — which features many of the funniest (or, depending on your outlook, most depressing) quotes from Cerf and Navasky’s bestselling book, Mission Accomplished! (or How We Won the War in Iraq) — was originally broadcast on “Ring of Fire,” the program Kennedy co-hosts with Mike Papantonio every weekend on Air America. To listen, click here.

Scott Horton interviewed Institute of Expertology co-founder Victor Navasky last week on his radio program, “Antiwar Radio.” You can read about and/or listen to it by visiting Scott Horton’s “Antiwar Radio” Website. Or you can listen to the interview — enhanced with video segments and images provided by Scott Horton himself –by clicking on the links below:

Hillary Clinton’s extremely gracious and effective Saturday speech in support of Barack Obama notwithstanding, the Institute has received a plethora of calls over the past few days in hopes we might be able to shed some light on the message the New York senator was attempting to deliver by choosing to wear a costume to her Wednesday AIPAC gig that looked almost identical to the one “Number Six,” Patrick McGoohan’s famous character on the TV series The Prisoner, found himself decked out in after he was kidnapped and incarcerated in “the Village.”

Although, as meta-experts, we cannot be expected to offer expertise on any subject beyond expertise itself, we can’t help but notice the similarity between the following exchange and the the interrogatory that opened every episode of The Prisoner: